On the 8th of August following a week of sporadic rioting, civil disorder and racially aggravated violence stemming in part from the horrific murder of three children at a Taylor Swift themed dance class several anti-racist gatherings took place across the United Kingdom. These were at least partially driven by allegedly leaked telegram chats and other disclosures from far-right channels which detailed their next targets of attack which included immigration-related charities, advice centres and solicitors.
These disclosures as well as spurring nationwide call-outs introduced a palpable sense of tension with several shopping centres either closing for the evening and additional police being deployed amid stories of sporadic outbreaks of violence. However the threat by and large did not materialise the police on the streets being met by crowds of peaceful, anti-racists. The following days media headlines were almost entirely positive ‘The Night Anti-Hate Marchers Faced Down The Thugs’ proclaimed the Daily Mail seemingly oblivious of its constant role in perpetuating torrid anti-immigration sentiment while The Guardian stated it was ‘United Against Hate’ once again perhaps ignorant of its recent foray into moral panics. A similar contradiction also appeared in the on the record statements of politicians with James Cleverly stating that the rioters were in part “the actions of people … responding to disinformation online” however in June this year Cleverly in statements given in response to high levels of reported mental health crises at the controversial immigration centre in Weathersfield, suggested apropos of any evidence “The simple truth is often when people come to this country illegally they do lie to further their causes.”
There has already been a wide spread of opinion on what the riots represent and with that the possible solutions, for many columnist the riots have been seen the result of the steady mainstreaming of disinformation and Russian propaganda. A Daily Mail front page on Thursday ran with the headline “Russia linked to fake news that sparked mosque riot”. However the organisation The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, suggested this was somewhat doubtful with few of the narratives that had stemmed from the sites linked to Russian sources being linked to those participating in the riots. Instead journalist present at the “Enough is Enough” protest unearthed several narratives many of which were very different to the ones mentioned by the Russian sites not to mention other protestors present however over the course of several interviews with those present some common themes began to emerge.
Several of the protestors connected the murders in Southport to illegal immigration and generally to knife crime in the United Kingdom. Among the chants present at the demonstration were “Stop the Boats”, which was perhaps most regularly stated by the last Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak as one of the priorities for his government government and “Save Our Kids”. The general story put forward by those present at the marches and quite regularly by the diverse array of voices on the right is that drastically reducing immigration, would among other things reduce knife crime. Various singular figures from the online right also played a role in amplifying misinformation with the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate, falsely suggesting the Southport attacker was an ‘undocumented migrant’. While the immediate response is generally to point to the statistics within the UK which do not support this hypothesis this does not explain why such ideas have come to form much of the conversation around immigration and immigrants. Nor does it go far in explaining much in terms of the form and content of the anti-immigration violence that marked the beginning of August.
In an article written around the first of August, for The Financial Times entitled ‘Who Is Behind the UKs Far-Right Riots’ authors Wallis and Stacey outline how those partaking in the riots evade easy description, rather than being attached to racist groupings such as British National Party, the far-right involved in the riots were rather a loose conglomeration of individual often online personalities, spontaneous protests and splinter groups.
Part of the response from newly appointed Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been focused on the social media platforms and various other communication channels on which some of these groups operate, reminding them that calls for violence would still fall within the remit of the criminal charge of incitement. This whilst capturing another avenue by which these groups organise does not address the central problem of correctly identifying the culprits or indeed their motivations. Calls to proscribe the EDL founded by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon also known as Tommy Robinson appears similarly poorly targeted given the group, according to most experts tracking extremist groups, has largely been non-functioning for over a decade.
What is perhaps more useful are comments made by Paul Jackson, later in the piece which makes the connection between the vilification of immigrants, made by politicians and the subsequent legitimacy afforded to groups amassing on the street who, as mentioned previously, often march under similar messages. Daniel Trilling, a journalist and former editor of New Humanist magazine drew a similar connection, citing former Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s smearing of ceasefire marches as ‘hate marches’ and Ben Bradley’s less than subtle labelling as the culture of London being “entirely alien and contradictory to life in working class towns in England.”
There is in these cases often a temptation to rely on economic explanations for the discord, with the Financial Times quick to note that seven out of ten most deprived regions of the UK witnessed rioting and also noting that many of these areas also had a higher than average proportion of asylum seekers in publicly funded accommodation, a legacy of the previous conservative governments strategy of housing migrants in cheaper areas whilst their application for asylum were processed. Rob McNeil, the deputy director of the Migrant Observatory noted that the areas where asylum seekers were housed often struggled with high unemployment which often contributed to a sense of competition over scarce resources. It is also common among progressives note that the UK has experienced fourteen years of austerity during which the society has only become more unequal however we should perhaps not be too hasty to assume that the motivations are solely economic in their origin.
Similar to the struggle over nationalist sentiments which regularly appeared as an impediment to the internationalism sought historically by the left, racial and ethnic conflict has in these riots also been weaponised often shrouded in references to “indigeneity”. Similarly those taking part in even the most violent actions were not solely members of the “white working class” a demographic regularly invoked to justify increasing focus on immigration, with small business owners and professionals also featuring within the groups detained after the riots. In the eruptions of violence, are manifested all features of social life, cultural, ideological, political and social. The regular feelings of precarity and anxiety surrounding downward social mobility are here converted into existential concerns over demographic change.
In the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s 2008 book ‘Violence’ he reflected on the causes of violence, noting that often those most focused on combating subjective violence, or to be more specific violence committed by a specific agent or group are often guilty of committing system violence, that is the violence inherent in systems that create surplus populations, homelessness, starvation and other subtler forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and control. In a chapter entitled ‘Fear Thy Neighbour As Thyself’ he outlined how he understands the predominant mode of politics to be post-political biopolitics. When deconstructed this refers to a mode of politics that claims to leave behind all of the old ideological struggles with it’s primary goal being the regulation, welfare, administration and security of human lives.
If however this is to be ground zero of politics, namely technocratic governance and expert coordination, one of the few energizing passions remaining is as we have seen regularly, fear. This alongside giving us another framework to understand the connection between much of the political rhetoric around immigration also gives us perhaps another response. Alongside a rejection of the xenophobic conspiracist lies espoused by panoply of figures looking to mobilize a base around these fears whether they be fears of harassment, fear of crime or fear of the state itself is a rejection of this specific framework being the only one in which politics can be defined. Not least because the acceptance of this framework is the renouncement of a politics based on universality in place of that which rejects the constitutive dimension of the political.
Notes